Abortion's Deleterious Effects on Women: Abortion and Breast Cancer.

For almost a decade, much of the Medical Establishment has firmly resisted the overwhelming evidence that there is a link between induced abortion and a heightened risk of breast cancer (the ABC link). It has insisted that the worldwide research showing women who have had an abortion are more likely to get breast cancer is flawed and unreliable.

However, a systematic review of 10 recent studies which have asserted that there is no ABC link, appearing in the winter 2005 edition of the peer-reviewed Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPANDS), sets the record straight. Dr. Joel Brind, a professor of endocrinology at Baruch College of the City University of New York and president of the Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, concludes that the studies do not in any manner disprove the ABC link. (The article can be read online at http://jpands.org/jpands1004.htm.)

ABC Link Has Long History

Evidence of the ABC link is not new. It has appeared in the medical literature since 1957. >TX The issue assumed a high national and international profile in 1994, when a study published by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in its own journal showed a 50% increased risk of breast cancer by age 45 for women who'd had any abortions.

That study, by Janet Daling and colleagues of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, also showed particularly alarming risk increases150%for women who'd had an abortion under age 18. And if such women also had a family history of breast cancer, the risk increase was reported as extraordinarily high.

The NCIthe largest institute of the National Institutes of Healthhas been backtracking ever since. Up until 2003, the NCI called the ABC link's evidence "inconsistent." But in that year, an NCI "workshop" proclaimed that the link's nonexistence was "well established."

That conclusion was reinforced in 2004 with a "collaborative reanalysis" of data published in the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet. The study concluded that "the studies of breast cancer with retrospective recording of induced abortion yielded misleading results, possibly because women who had developed breast cancer were, on average, more likely than other women to disclose previous induced abortions."